Interview: U.S. Behaving Like Warlord in the World

The one advantage that they have in the world is that the NATO countries account for 70% of the arms spending on the planet and have a war machine that is second to none, the clear and absolute superiority on that score. And so they play the only card that they have and that is their military, for example in Africa by suborning the militaries of most African states.

They are not businessmen anymore. They are intimidators, they are behaving like warlords in the world and warlords can take, can stand, can live, with a lot more chaos than people who want to conduct business.

====

As the entire Middle East is in chaos and on the verge of slipping into a state of further conflict and all-out war, the United States, “imperialists and their junior partners in imperialism”, are moving away from the region and now focusing on Africa. The West is in decline and no longer the master of the world economically, so there are playing the only card they have: military might. In an assessment of AFRICOM Glen Ford laid out the facts above and more.

Robles: My first question now, it seems that NATO and the US have moved their war on terror from the Middle East and they are moving into Africa. Why is that?

Ford: Africa is the unclaimed space, but you know when we are talking about empire, when we are talking about imperialism, US imperialism and its junior partners in imperialism, in NATO, every space on earth is actually of strategic value, but Africa of course in terms of resources is of immense value and as far as they are concerned it is unclaimed. Certainly they don’t respect the claims of Africans themselves to Africa.

Robles: So, there’re racial motivations to this you think?

Ford: No, but racial realities, the realities of the racism of much of the populations of Europe and the United States make the militarization and the assaults on sovereign nations in Africa much more palatable to public opinion in the home countries.

For example, the demonization of Muammar Kaddafi that dates back almost two generations may the massive NATO-US assault on Libya something that was quite palatable to most sectors of the American public and, as it appears, to European publics as well; the wide-spread and racist assumption that Africans cannot govern themselves, are incapable of such, makes US intervention in the affairs of African states appear to the home countries’ public, as something that is beneficial to the Africans as opposed to an infringement of their human rights.

What is striking here is the United States since the beginning of the decolonization period in Africa had a policy of imposing an environment of chaos in those regions that it cannot control.

We saw that play out in Congo, for example, that is Congo was plunged into chaos at the time of independence, and Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected leader of the Congo, was assassinated by the Belgians and the Americans.

The chaos imposed from the outside did not end until they got their guy Mobutu as head of the Congo and Mobutu served their purposes for decades. When he no longer served their purposes in the mid-90s, they then plunged Congo again into chaos working through their two henchmen regimes, in Rwanda and Uganda, America’s strongest allies in black Africa, and created such chaos that 6 million Congolese have died as a result since 1996.

This is long been the policy in Africa. We could make the comparison in Somalia for example as well, which the United States spent a great deal of money perpetuating an environment of chaos there since the early 90s.

Now it appears, I just wanted to make this connection, that the objective condition, the decay of imperialism is such that they are willing to impose chaos as a matter of policy in the Middle East and in North Africa as well.

And so we see the chaos of Libya as being preferable to the United States and NATO to the orderliness and in fact good trade relations that existed with Kaddafi’s regime and the chaos and carnage in Syria asbeing preferable to orderly relations with the Assad government. This is quite disturbing.

Robles: I see.

Why are disorder and revolution and revolt and upheaval more positive for the US and NATO?

Ford: Because the United States and the Europeans, I am talking about the advanced capitalists countries, Europe as well as the United States, is now ruled by finance capitalists. This is the profound change that has occurred over the last 30 years in the capitalist system that the long struggle, contention, between manufacturing capital and financial capital has now been resolved in favor of finance capital. Finance capital does not make things, it does not produce anything; it is simply monetizes everything that it can, it makes its money from rigging markets, and from manipulation and it is in no shape, no position to compete in terms of conventional trade with the rising economic powers of the global south and China.

This is a really unique period that we’ve entered in the world where in a country like Brazil that we referred to as part of the third world not too long ago, its development bank now has a much larger portfolio than the World Bank does.

And so we see India and China and Brazil and other nations, Indonesia and Malaysia, playing a vigorous, robust role in world trade, China having captured a larger portion of the African trade and even the South American trade right there in the Western Hemisphere, in the US’s backyard, so at this point, at this juncture in history, the Europeans and the Americans cannot compete with these rising economic forces and they don’t even try.

The one advantage that they have in the world is that the NATO countries account for 70% of the arms spending on the planet and have a war machine that is second to none, the clear and absolute superiority on that score. And so they play the only card that they have and that is their military, for example in Africa by suborning the militaries of most African states.

You know, most African countries, all but a handful, notably Zimbabwe, and Eritrea, and now Sudan, all but a handful of African countries have agreements, relations, ongoing connections with AFRICOM.

So, although China, India and Brazil have long eclipsed the United States and Europe in terms of trade, the United States has in a hip-pocket a relationship with African militaries that can veto, through coup d’état, through military means any geopolitical realignments of forces.

So, that is why they are moving in this fashion. If they didn’t see their destiny in conventional trade as we’ve come to know it in the world, then chaos is a good default kind of position and they are willing to risk it.

They are not businessmen anymore. They are intimidators, they are behaving like warlords in the world and warlords can take, can stand, can live, with a lot more chaos than people who want to conduct business.